This thesis analyses the content, tone, form and authorship of the national newspaper gossip column 1918-1939, as a new means through which the qualities of the popular press in this period can be more closely defined. Often dismissed as an example of the sensational, Americanization of early twentieth-century popular culture, the celebrity gossip column has been loosely grouped with the friendly, informal language and bolder formatting of the ‘New Journalism’ of the late nineteenth century and the development of the dramatic ‘human-interest’ stories of ‘everyday life’ in the interwar period (LeMahieu, 1988; Wiener, 1988). Through a comparative study of six newspapers including the Daily Express, Daily Mail and News of the World, I analyse the changing representation of the celebrity subject, and, originally, the shifting character and persona of the gossip columnist. Whereas some historians have analysed the content of newspapers without considering the questions of the newspaper’s production, I analyse newspaper employment records, gossip columnists’ memoirs and their unpublished letters and diaries to define the specific economic, social and cultural circumstances which, I argue, influenced their public portrayal. Also, in examining the unpublished correspondence between editors, proprietors and columnists and the burgeoning print culture of journalistic training manuals and professional memoirs, I provide a history of the press’s professionalization in this period. The national popular press has often been used as a historical source to define national character and national identity in the interwar period (Bland, 2008; Kohn, 1992). By scrutinizing the content and production of the gossip column and particularly the class, behaviour, interactions and subject matter of the columnist, I argue that the gossip column presented a version of ‘Britishness’ that was not so inward-looking and domesticated as so many accounts of interwar Britain suggest.

At the onset of the First World War, Germany was subject to a shipping embargo by the Allied forces. Ostensibly military in nature, the blockade prevented not only armaments but also food and fertilizers from entering Germany. The impact of this blockade on civilian populations has been debated ever since. Germans protested that the Allies had wielded hunger as a weapon against women and children with devastating results, a claim that was hotly denied by the Allies. The impact of what the Germans termed the 'Hungerblockade' on childhood nutrition can now be assessed using various anthropometric sources on school children, several of which are newly discovered. Statistical analysis reveals a grim truth: German children suffered severe malnutrition due to the blockade. Social class impacted risk of deprivation, with working-class children suffering the most. Surprisingly, they were the quickest to recover after the war. Their rescue was fuelled by massive food aid organized by the former enemies of Germany, and delivered cooperatively with both government and civil society. Children, and those who cared for them, responded to these acts of service with gratitude and joy. The ability of former belligerents to work together after an exceptionally bitter war to feed impoverished children may hold hope for the future.

This thesis is an examination of the history of Salter Bros Ltd and the firms connected with it. Founded in 1858, it became not only one of the most important businesses associated with the recent history of the Upper Thames, but also a significant employer in Oxford. The study takes a thematic approach, which involves examining the five main areas of the firm’s commercial activities, which were: providing services for the sport of rowing (chapter 1), boat-building (chapter 2), boat-letting (chapter 3), passenger boat operating (chapter 4) and property development (chapter 5). This thesis draws on the firm’s archive, which has previously been unavailable to scholars. The mainly quantitative data from the archive is contextualised by reference to wider qualitative sources, although there is not always much comparative information to draw on. Finally, it focuses on the evolution of the workforce, which shows how the business managed to survive both the impact of the industrialisation of Oxford in the twentieth century and some of the challenges associated with family firms (chapter 6). By examining the areas shown above, the work sheds light on our understanding of (1) the socio-economic context of Oxford and the Thames, (2) the development of different forms of water-based leisure, and (3) how a family firm overcame some of the classic weaknesses of such businesses. Chapter 1 analyses the contribution that the firm made to the sport of rowing. The family moved to a riverside tavern in the mid-1830s and this resulted in heavy involvement with the rowing scene. They made a successful transition from professional oarsmen to successful racing boat-builders, which led to John and Stephen Salter moving to Oxford to start their own business in 1858. By exploiting the strong local rowing scene they built their firm up to be the market leader in the 1860s. Supplying craft for the Oxford and Cambridge (university) boat race was important for helping the business gain worldwide fame and, although Salters’ lost the ascendency in the 1870s, it provided a wide range of services for the sport until the second half of the twentieth century. It then slowly became divorced from the rowing scene and, despite a brief renaissance in the 1970s, the company finally bowed out of racing boat construction at the end of the 1980s. Chapter 2 explores the development of the boat-building side of the business. The firm was a major producer of craft and it was especially busy in the late 1920s and late 1970s, when new products helped to stimulate demand. By examining four areas of expertise (steel manufacturing, motorised boats, corporation craft and fibreglass construction) it becomes clear that the business was relatively slow to embrace new technology. Yet although it was not particularly innovative, Salters’ successfully exploited a number of emerging markets, like supplying craft for council-run boating lakes from the 1920s onwards. After a period of decline in the 1960s, the firm’s boat-building department was briefly revived by the introduction of fibreglass construction in the following decade, although this brought to an end skilled craftsmanship in the industry. Salters’ had to be flexible in order to survive, as is shown by the contract work it took on during the two World Wars, but in the second half of the twentieth century the firm’s focus moved away from boat-building towards providing leisure services. Chapter 3 examines the nature and timing of the rise of pleasure boating on the Thames and Salters’ role in promoting it. The railway destroyed much of the carrying trade on the river, but the waterway gained a new lease of life by the rise of leisure activities on it. Different types of boating were popular at different times and certain waterside locations were busier than others, but it is possible to discern short-term peaks in pleasure boating on the Upper Thames, as a whole, in the early 1890s and either side of the First World War (although the river became busier still after the Second World War). There were many factors contributing to the rise of leisure on the waterway, but Salters’ helped to popularise ‘the Thames trip’ between London and Oxford, which was linked to the growth of camping. The firm’s fortunes were also closely tied to the local market and by the late 1880s it had one of the largest fleets of rental craft in the country. Salters’ had to diversify according to changing fashions in pleasure boating, but after the 1920s there was a slow reduction in the number of craft it operated, until it stopped boat-letting altogether in the early 1990s – although this side of the business was revived a decade later, albeit on a smaller scale. Chapter 4 explores the firm’s involvement with passenger services on the waterway. The long-distance steamboat trips took much longer to become established on the Upper Thames, because of the logistical problems caused by having to pass through locks. Salters’ was the first business to make a success of running between Oxford and Kingston and it did this by forging a close association with the railway, which opened up the river to the day-trip market, and by building up its fleet to establish a monopoly over the long-distance journey. The service had to overcome many challenges, but one of the most serious problems it faced was the growth in pleasure boating after the Second World War. Although passenger numbers on the steamers peaked in the 1970s, general traffic on the river also reached record levels, which caused significant delays and forced the firm to end the through-service between Oxford and Kingston. Furthermore, by catering for the growing demand for shorter round trips Salters’ was drawn into direct competition with other companies that were already focused on this market. By the end of the twentieth century, the firm was no longer dominating the waterway and it was heavily reliant on income from both its home city of Oxford and private parties. Chapter 5 examines the extent and significance of the property the firm came to occupy. Salters’ acquired many new properties in order to expand the business and the firm’s success also enabled it to accumulate residential accommodation, which was part of the employment package offered to its staff, as well as being a source of rental income. The commercial sites were useful for preventing competitors from encroaching on the firm’s territory, whilst they were also subsequently used for further development. Most importantly, the property was a reservoir of capital that Salters’ relied upon in times of financial hardship. Chapter 6 focuses on how the workforce evolved in the twentieth century, which sheds light on how the business survived both the industrialisation of Oxford and some of the challenges associated with family firms. Salters’ went from being an employer with a highly skilled and local workforce to one that had fewer specialised craftsmen and which recruited mainly from outside the city. This was symptomatic of the city’s employment market that had been transformed by the motor industry in the interwar period, as well as the firm’s greater focus on its passenger boats, which was connected with it. Salters’ had to be flexible to accommodate the changes, but it was unable to compete with the high wages offered in the car factories and a shortage of local labour meant that it not only struggled to retain employees, particularly its skilled craftsmen, but standards of discipline also deteriorated. Nevertheless, the impact of wage competition was mitigated by the firm’s paternalism and the considerable appeal of working on the passenger boats. The latter offered an enjoyable lifestyle that was very different from the working environment of other waterway communities. The Salter family also played an important part in the survival of their company.

This thesis explores some aspects of the cultural history of the railway during the latter half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. It argues that the railway was of central importance in creating and shaping Victorian attitudes to the machine and to mechanized civilization in a world increasingly dominated by large scale-technologies. In particular, it explores the significance of negative responses to the railway - fear, anxiety, nervousness, alarm, revulsion - in influencing a range of social, cultural and medical responses to the perceived degenerative threat of technological civilization. The four chapters of the thesis are organized so as to provide a progressive tightening of focus on particular aspects of the railway's significance in this context. The first, most wide-ranging, chapter explores the ways in which the Victorian railway was perceived as both an icon of progress and civilization and as a disruptive, threatening, destructive force. In particular, it seeks to establish the deep-rooted, enduring and influential nature of the fear and anxiety which the railway provoked. The second chapter is concerned with the railway journey as an experience, relating the ambivalence with which the railway was viewed to the journey as a sensory, physical and mental experience. The third chapter focuses on the accident as the most dramatic instance of the dangers of the railway, and relates its significance in contemporary culture to the wider context of the fears provoked by increasingly powerful and potentially destructive technologies. The fourth and final chapter explores the phenomenon of 'railway spine', the obscure nervous condition supposedly suffered by railway accident victims who had seemingly received no actual organic injury, but nonetheless displayed nervous, mental and physical symptoms of serious bodily disorder.

Cette thèse porte sur les transformations de l’économie et de la société romaines au cours d’un long XVe siècle (1398-1527). La croissance économique de Rome est provoquée et entretenue par le retour de la papauté après la parenthèse du Schisme. À partir du milieu du XVe siècle, les rythmes de l’économie romaine s’accélèrent : l’afflux de capitaux provenant des marchands-banquiers toscans, mais aussi réinvestis de l’économie rurale dans l’économie urbaine, créent de nouvelles conditions de production et de nouveaux modes de consommation. La réactivation du statut de capitale s’accompagne d’une demande croissante, en particulier en produits de luxe. L’enjeu de cette recherche est de comprendre et d’analyser comment la société romaine, les familles et les individus qui la composent, se sont adaptés à cette nouvelle conjoncture, parfois encore incertaine. Plus largement, il s’agit d’étudier l’adaptation des comportements et des pratiques socio-économiques à la croissance démographique et économique. Les thématiques abordées couvrent un spectre très large, depuis l’économie rurale du casale jusqu’au marché immobilier, du cadre macro-économique à travers l’approvisionnement urbain et les importations jusqu’à la micro-histoire des artisans, bouchers, poissonniers. L’un des axes de la thèse porte sur les phénomènes de mobilité sociale qui affectent aussi bien les milieux populaires que la noblesse citadine. Enfin, cette thèse replace Rome dans un contexte plus large, celui des villes d’Italie, soulignant ses spécificités ou sa conformité avec les modèles d’Italie septentrionale ou méridionale. / This PhD aims at improving our understanding of the deep transformations that affect both Roman economy and society during the 15th century (1398-1527). The economic revival displayed by the Quattrocento’s Rome turns out to be sustained and increased by the return of the papal Court in Rome by the end of the 14th century. From the second half of the 15th century indeed, Roman economy’s pace changes, financial resources are flooding from the country to the city also as from Tuscan merchant-bankers, creating new conditions of production and new patterns of consumption. The renewed status of capital city leads to an ever-increasing demand, especially in luxury products. What’s at stake is to analyse and enlighten how the Roman society managed to adapt itself and to respond to a changing situation and to an impressive demographic and economic growth. The six chapters of this book cover a wide scale, from the rural economy of the casale up to the real estate market ; from the macroeconomic frame through the question of urban supply and imports up to the microstoria of craftsmen, butchers, fishmongers. This PhD also deals with the process of social mobility which concern the urban nobility as well as the craftsmen. Finally, this research replaces Rome in the wider context of the Italian urban world, by trying to underline its specificities or its conformity to the models of northern and southern Italy.

This thesis considers the extent to which the International Criminal Court's Office of the Prosecutor ('OTP') has been successful in realising its self-defined mandate of ending impunity in Kenya. In particular, it focuses on the OTP's attempts to encourage domestic investigations and prosecutions as part of its strategy of positive complementarity. This strategy has been hailed as being the best and perhaps the only way that the OTP may use its finite resources to make a significant contribution to ending impunity. Despite this, no empirical study has been published that evaluates the effectiveness of this strategy and the impact that it has on ending impunity in the targeted situation country. This thesis seeks to address this gap in the literature by conducting a case study on the OTP's implementation of its strategy of positive complementarity in Kenya following that country's post-election violence in 2007/08. In doing so, I also hope to make a modest contribution to existing debates over the effectiveness of the ICC as an institution as well as international criminal justice and transitional justice more generally.

Placed deposits have received increasing attention over the past 30 years, particularly in prehistoric British archaeology. Although disagreement still exists over the definition, identification, and interpretation of placed deposits, significant advances have been made in theoretical and methodological approaches to placed deposits, as researchers have gradually moved away from relatively crude ‘ritual’ interpretations toward more nuanced considerations of how placed deposits may have related to daily lives, social networks, and settlement structure, as well as worldview. With the exception of comments on specific deposits and a recent preliminary survey, however, Anglo-Saxon placed deposits have remained largely unstudied. This thesis represents the first systematic attempt to identify, characterize, analyse and interpret placed deposits in early to middle Anglo-Saxon settlements (5th–9th centuries). It begins by disentangling the various definitions of ‘placed’, ‘structured’, and ‘special’ deposits and their associated assumptions. Using formation process theory as a basis, it develops a definition of placed deposits as material that has been specially selected, treated, and/or arranged, in contrast with material from similar or surrounding contexts. This definition was applied to develop contextually specific criteria for identifying placed deposits in Anglo-Saxon settlements. Examination of 141 settlements identified a total of 151 placed deposits from 67 settlements. These placed deposits were characterized and analysed for patterns in terms of material composition, context type, location within the settlement, and timing of deposition relative to the use-life of their contexts. Broader geographical and chronological trends have also been considered. In discussing these patterns, anthropological theories of action, agency, practice, and ritualization have been employed in order to begin to understand the roles placed deposits may have had in structuring space and time and expressing social identities in Anglo-Saxon settlements, and to consider how placed deposition may have articulated with Anglo-Saxon worldview and belief systems.

This thesis presents a first archaeological introduction to the study of Byzantine ports, harbours and other coastal installations in the region of Thessaly. Thessaly not only constitutes an ideal region to gain equal information for the Early- to the Late Byzantine periods, but also to compare independent regional and imperial central building activities. However, in particular Thessaly’s maritime connectivity has never been studied in detail before. As such, a first step into a terra incognita, the thesis is divided into two main sections: In order to conceptualize the study of harbour sites, the thesis first sets up a framework for the definition, understanding and interpretation of the physical features of harbours and their function and purpose. Taking into account influencing environmental conditions, such as natural, economic, social and political components, this helps to determine an accurate hierarchical model and to illustrate the interrelationship between different types and forms of harbour sites. Subsequently, comprehensive archaeological investigations around the island of Skiathos and other harbour sites in Thessaly, executed in 2012 and 2013, are set against this theoretical groundwork. In contrast to the common approach of regional studies, where a first general overview is followed by individual detailed case-studies, the opposite methodology is undertaken in order to achieve a systematic study of the Thessalian harbours and the complexity of their network system. Consequently, the collection of data starts from the analysis of a distinct area of a region and continues with the broader regional picture of primary ports, secondary harbours and staple markets. Functioning as an important junction of the Aegean shipping lanes and being involved in regional as well as supra-regional trade and port networks, focus is therefore primarily dedicated to the island of Skiathos. A joint survey project in cooperation with the Greek Ephorate for Underwater Antiquities (EEA), the 13th Greek Ephorate for Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities and the 7th Greek Ephorate for Byzantine Antiquities was initiated by the author in 2012. A number of sites, including harbour installations and other coastal infrastructures, have been detected, documented and subsequently verified by geophysical prospections, using a Sub-bottom profiler and Side-Scan Sonar, in 2013. These have allowed to draw a clear historical picture of architectural developments, port networks and changes in the socio-economic connectivity of the area. Followed by a close investigation of further harbour sites throughout the entire region of Thessaly during two field seasons between 2012 and 2013, the detailed picture gained from the Skiathos survey project is brought to a wider context. This comparison finally allows an overall picture of the history and architectural developments of harbour structures and associated coastal sites, as well as general conclusions concerning the hierarchy and port network in the region during the Early to Late Byzantine periods. This has allowed a comprehensive understanding of the growth, use and decline of various ports, harbours and staple markets within Thessaly and has important repercussions for our understanding of wider social and economic changes that were occurring during these periods, such as the rise of the church as a powerful economic institution or the increasing activities of private entrepreneurs. In this way the submerged maritime heritage of Thessaly has provided a rich new resource with which to understand the cultural dynamics of the region as it emerged from its peripheral location to comprising major ports within the Roman maritime network and to stand out of the heart of the commercial route ways to and from Constantinople, as well as being part of the emergent networks of the western maritime states at the end of the period, such as Venice.

This thesis is a cultural history of the early Fabian Society, focusing on the decades between 1884, the Society’s inaugural year, and 1914. The canonical view is that ‘Fabianism,’ which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as the ‘doctrine and principles of the Fabian Society,’ is synonymous with State socialism and bureaucratic ‘efficiency.’ By bringing the methods of cultural history to bear on the Society’s founding members and decades, this thesis reveals that ‘Fabianism’ was in fact used as a dynamic metonymy, not a fixed doctrine, which signified a range of cultural, and even literary, meanings for British commentators in the 1890s and 1900s (Part 1). Further, by expanding the scope of traditional histories of the Fabian Society, which conventionally operate within political and economic sub-fields and focus on the Society’s ‘official’ literature, to include a close examination of the broader discursive context in which ‘Fabianism’ came into being, this thesis sets out to recover the symbolic aspects of the Fabians’ efforts to negotiate what ‘Fabianism’ meant to the English reading public. The Fabians’ conspicuous leadership in the modern education debates and the liberal fight for a ‘free stage,’ and their solidarity with the international political émigrés living in London at the turn of the twentieth century all contribute to this revised perspective on who the founding Fabians were, what they saw themselves as trying to achieve, and where the Fabian Society belonged—and was perceived to belong—in relation to British politics, culture, and society (Part 2). The original contribution of this thesis is the argument that the Fabians explicitly and implicitly evoked Matthew Arnold as a precursor in their efforts to articulate a kind of Fabian—latterly social-democratic—liberalism and a public vocation that balanced English liberties and the duty of the State to provide the ‘best’ for its citizens in education and in culture, as in politics.

This thesis provides a fresh investigation of a collection of Roman imperial biographies conventionally known as the 'Historia Augusta'. The thesis supports the authenticity of the texts included in this corpus, in particular the claims they make about their dates, authorship, and scope, through philological, literary, prosopographical, and historical arguments. It shows that this corpus of texts, if the main conclusions are accepted, potentially improves our understanding of the tetrarchic-Constantinian era. It also explores the wider implications for the historiography of the fourth century; the transmission and formation of multi-author corpora in antiquity and the middle ages. It also suggests that the canon of Latin imperial biographies be widened. The thesis has two parts. Part I explores the actual state of the corpus, its textual transmission, and relation to other texts. It shows that the ancient and medieval paratexts presented the corpus as a collection of imperial biographies. The paratexts are compatible with the authorial statements in the main text. It then explores the corpus' medieval transmission, and the interest medieval scholars had in such texts. This part suggests that the corpus’s current state explains well the inconsistencies found in it. Finally, it shows that words and phrases, once thought peculiar to the corpus and the holy grail of the forgery argument, are intertextual links to earlier texts. Part II explores chronological statements and historical episodes relevant to the Diocletianic-Constantinan period. It establishes the actual dates of each author, and suggests that the confusion found in these biographies is similar to that of other contemporaries. The few apostrophes are shown to be authentic, and the historical and prosopographical passages are shown to represent, and improve our understanding of, the zeitgeist and history of the period. The final conclusion weaves the various arguments together, and emphasises the authenticity and significance of the corpus' texts. It suggests separating the composition of the texts from the disinterested formation of the corpus as a whole, as part of a new hypothesis and further lines of enquiry.